He would hold that post for 41 years and encourage the other young pioneers whose stories Mr. Holmes quotes deftly from Banks’s delightfully candid journals, noting that Banks wrote with “gentlemanly jeu d’esprit.”) The book then follows Banks back to England, where, at the age of 35, he became president of the Royal Society in 1778. James Cook, brought the eager young botanist Joseph Banks to a place he would regard as a paradise, botanical and otherwise. The first, a trip to Tahiti in 1769 led by Capt. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Was that cause for wonder or terror? What were its theological implications? How would it influence a future generation of poets? (The thrill of this breakthrough would later figure in one of Keats’s most famous sonnets, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”) Where would it figure in the relay race of scientific discoveries? Thanks to Herschel the idea of a fixed universe was challenged, replaced by a cosmos in flux. Beyond enlivening the story of Herschel’s discovery into a gripping narrative, this book speculates fascinatingly about the ramifications of such a breakthrough.
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